November 26, 2007 | Monday
2007 Euro online ad spend to break Eur11 billion – 33% YoY growth
By Matt Brocklehurst, Head of Marketing in Marketing |News |PPC |Search Research
IAB Europe forecast that online ad spend in Europe will hit the Eur11.5 billion mark this year – a healthy growth of some 33% year on year. This forecast was a key finding presented at the IAB leadership council last Friday.
As you’re probably aware this figure includes Classified, Search, Email and Display. The forecast is based on IAB Europe member countries providing estimated growth rates for 2007 then numbercrunching on 2006 figures (total was Eur8.003 billion – see emarketer article )
It was reported that countries with more mature markets were still predicting growth rates of 25% whilst others were still very much in boom-time with estimated growth of 100%. The growth drivers highlighted were social media, video, mobile, behavioural targeting, and gaming.
This is all encouraging news for advertisers and further vindication of the changing tide towards more measureable and engaging advertising. All good stuff but the questions that really intrigued me on the day were “Can you advertise around conversation rather then content? and “is there still a role for disruptive ads?”. These were addressed in part by Caroline Vogt, Head of International Research, Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions. She was presenting on a global study that looked at internet users” “modes, moods and attitudes”, assessing receptivity to advertising and analysing how the findings can be fed into the media planning and buying process. The overview concentrated on the European results, collected from France, Germany, Norway and the UK.
I scribbled the results down furiously so these may not be 100% accurate but there is some interesting insights nevertheless. The below table shows % of activities that motivate people to visit the internet and % of time actually spent on the internet for this activity.
Activity: Motivation %, Actual Time %
Communication: 40%, 35%
Information: 29%, 18%
Entertainment: 13%, 18%
Surfing: 13%, 9%
Transactions: 11%, 9%
Creation: 3%, 4%
You can see that Communication and Entertainment together with Creation form a healthy share and is indicative of the boom in social media. The survey also went further to delve into users openness to and awareness of ads. I’ve quickly recreated the chart click here.
This found that Information, or Search, still holds the aces. In Search people tend to be looking for “something”, of course, and adverts add value to this journey. Users are as such both more aware and receptive. The challenge for marketers using “social spaces” is to move that blue circle in the chart “North East”. Using the new targeting features on Facebook last week, I do see potential. I’m optimistic that well targeted advertising in these spaces can get still better results but doubt it will ever leapfrog Search and Information in terms of receptiveness.
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